ChasNote

You careful ChasNote readers may have seen this coming when you read last month about Chevy’s sponsorship the Best of the Green Web project (or Dell’s sponsorship of a green drawing contest in Facebook’s Graffiti), but now it’s official. FM has launched its Green Federation, a collection of the best green-leaning sites online, including Inhabitat, GigaOM’s Earth2Tech and the ViroPOP video network.

Here’s the press release.

According to analysis by Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb, Ars Technica is the source of 87 front page Digg stories in the past 30 days, making Ars the top source for Digg conversations. Gizmodo and Engaget are close behind, filling out the top three. TechCrunch, GigaOM, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are other FM sites in the top ten. These are the brands that start the conversations, while Digg spreads the conversation to a much wider audience.

Techmeme’s Leaderboard does a similar analysis of sites-of-origin for stories tracked by its service. For the past 30 days, the top ten (in order) is TechCrunch, CNET, Engadget, NY Times, Ars Technica, ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, WSJ, The Register, and PaidContent.

At AllBusiness, Om says:

“The focus here is 80 percent original reporting and 20 percent opinions…. People want real information. They get tired of opinions quickly. You use that kind of opinion-style blogging as backfill for information, like what traditional news services do. What we are doing is analysis and original reporting, which means we actually go out and talk to people.”